ecoculture, geophilosophy, mediapolitics

Anthropocenic reckoning

With environmental and eco-political news in the front pages daily, it’s easy to get back into the swing of regular, even daily, posting after the winter holiday lull. Here’s more on the “dating the ecocrisis” theme…

Andy Revkin is reporting that the Anthropocene Working Group has concluded that the middle of the twentieth century makes most sense as a date of the beginning of the Anthropocene.

“In a paper published online this week by the journal Quaternary International, 26 members of the working group point roughly to 1950 as the starting point, indicated by a variety of markers, including the global spread of carbon isotopes from nuclear weapon detonations starting in 1945 and the mass production and disposal of plastics. (About six billion tons have been made, with a billon of those tons dumped and a substantial amount spread around the world’s seas.)”

Given that the term Anthropocene is intended to be descriptive, not analytical, this makes perfect sense to me. The causes of those markers — nuclear fallout, plastics, and so on — can be traced to some combination of other factors, including industrialization, capitalism, the nation-state system, European colonialism, and whatever else. But it’s what’s occurred, not what accounts for it, that is the message here. The rest is that much more difficult to ascertain.

I keep regular dialogue with critics of Revkin’s more optimistic position, a few of whom have shared their views on this blog (e.g., Clive Hamilton and Kieran Suckling). But I should admit that I like Revkin’s way of inclusively juxtaposing the different views we might take — Hamilton’s, Elizabeth Kolbert’s, and others — while fitting them into a more empowering narrative frame. He writes,

“We have to accept ourselves, flaws and all, in order to move beyond what has been something of an unconscious, species-scale pubescent growth spurt, enabled by fossil fuels in place of testosterone.”

This doesn’t sound celebratory to me, at least in the old Promethean sense, as much as it sounds like a reckoning: here we are, for better or worse, and we (humans) must contend with ourselves along with everyone and everything else. Let’s do it thoughtfully. Referring to Alan Weisman’s thought experiment of The World Without Us, he says, “We’re stuck with “The World With Us.””

Revkin is trying to expand the audience for this kind of reflectiveness, not keep it restricted to the hardcore regretters, repenters, and jeremiahs. I think that’s a good thing.